First opened Tuesday, March 9, 2010
梅雨
つゆ
- flat (heiban)
How to read it: a line over a kana means the voice is high there, and ↓ marks where it drops. A kana with no line is low. With no ↓ the pitch stays high to the end and does not drop even on a following particle (が, は).
rainy season
“Plum rain” on paper, つゆ in speech, and no certain origin for the sound.
Taken apart
No breakdown is shown for this word: Wiktionary's text for it doesn't give a split that spells the word and joins to its reading, and any other split would be a guess.
In a sentence
We don't have the data for this section. The pinned Tatoeba export has no sentence with a translation that uses this word and passes our filter.
What Wiktionary says
Quoted line by line from Wiktionary's Etymology section for this reading, taken from one dated dump so it can't change underneath us. Nothing below is paraphrased.
Not settled
Wiktionary itself hedges on part of this word's origin — those lines are marked below.
- “First attested in the mid-Muromachi period.”
- Hedged“Derivation unclear, likely theories include:”
- Hedged“* May be cognate with 露 (tsuyu, “dew, dewdrop”), from the way the rainy season causes everything to be covered in drops that may look like dew. However, the pitch accent differs, as 露 (tsuyu) has either an 頭高型 (atamadaka-gata) or 尾高型 (odaka-gata) pattern, while 梅雨 (tsuyu) has a 平板型 (heiban-gata) pattern.”
- Hedged“* Alternatively, may be cognate with classical verb 熟ゆ (tsuyu, modern 熟える (tsueru), “to become ripe”), as plums ripen during the rainy season. In light of the pitch accent and semantics, this derivation appears more likely.”
- “The spelling is an orthographic borrowing from Chinese 梅雨.”
Source: Wiktionary: 梅雨 (dump of 2026-09-02), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Reading, meaning and part of speech from JMdict, and kanji readings from KANJIDIC2 (EDRDG).
Other readings of 梅雨 on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not つゆ. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
ばいう
- “From Middle Chinese compound 梅雨 (MC mwoj hjuX), in poetic reference to the season when plums grow or ripen.”
- “Alternatively, the 黴雨 spelling may have been the original spelling. This is homophonous in Middle Chinese, and literally means “mold + rain”, in reference to how moldy things get during this season of constant humidity.”
What the labels mean
- Derivation
- A word built from a stem plus a suffix or prefix.
- Borrowing
- Taken over from another language.
- Ateji
- Kanji chosen for their sound or sense after the word existed.
- Origin unclear
- Scholars disagree, or nobody knows.